A FIELD GUIDE TO SAN FRANCISCO’S ICONIC STREET SIGNS

Written By Ben Zotto
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San Francisco as surveyed in 1853, the year of the first street sign ordinance. Map: U.S. Coast Survey (detail)

San Francisco as surveyed in 1853, the year of the first street sign ordinance. Map: U.S. Coast Survey (detail)

Montgomery at Clay, 1859. Photo: Library of Congress.

Montgomery at Clay, 1859. Photo: Library of Congress.

Different styles of gaslamp street signage. Left, Dupont (now Grant) and Jackson, 1880s. Right, 4th and Jessie, in the aftermath of the 1906 quake. Photos: OpenSFHistory/wnp37.10020.jpg (left, detail), OpenSFHistory/wnp15.181.jpg (right, detail).

Different styles of gaslamp street signage. Left, Dupont (now Grant) and Jackson, 1880s. Right, 4th and Jessie, in the aftermath of the 1906 quake. Photos: OpenSFHistory/wnp37.10020.jpg (left, detail), OpenSFHistory/wnp15.181.jpg (right, detail).

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Fancy! (And perhaps fanciful?) Illustration: “Popular Mechanics,” November 1915. 

Fancy! (And perhaps fanciful?) Illustration: “Popular Mechanics,” November 1915. 

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Department of Public Works Sign Shop, 1926. Photo: OpenSFHistory/wnp36.04111

The literal horse and buggy days were still recent enough in memory that the blue signs felt (unfairly!) grounded in that era. Supervisor Marvin Lewis prompted the redesign program in May of 1946. The design was done by the Traffic Engineering Section of the city’s Engineering Bureau, and after some iteration resulted in:

  1. 4" tall lettering, embossed for contrast. (Visibility using flat surfaces was considered poor when light reflected at an angle.) The street types were dropped from the the signage (i.e. “OAK STREET” became just “OAK”) except in cases of ambiguity, like a numbered street vs. an avenue, for example.

  2. A larger, 33"x7" enameled steel plate. The porcelain enamel material was understood to resist the corrosion of salty sea air, and so was retained from the earlier designs.

  3. High-visibilty black-on-white color scheme. The white was enameled and the black was painted on the embossed portions.

  4. Rounded corners on the plate and a rounded-rectangle embossed black border around the edges suggest an intentional design echo of the older sign holder frames, but in retrospect turned out to be a notable design element of their own.

  5. For the first time, block numbers were added, using smaller 12" x 4½" plates mounted above the street name. These were useful navigation aids, and having a separate component for them made mass production and replacement simpler.

The design was validated in two newly-developed tract neighborhoods, and the first public replacements were put up on Golden Gate Ave between Leavenworth and Larkin in early November of 1946. Soon the program was rolling out across the city, replacing the blue enamel signs. These embossed signs were the archetype for—and most graphically satisfying of— all the variations to follow.

The 4" lettering on the white signs initially used a somewhat modified version of the chunky style in the (deep breath) Manual and Specifications for the Manufacture, Display, and Erection of U. S. Standard Road Markers and Signs of 1927. That manual was in force as a standard until the 1940s. These letters had much of the blockiness of their forbears but used curves on their natural corners for a sleeker chunky look. There were at least four widths of the font used, depending on the space available. The most dramatic of these has essentially square characters, as seen above in the “SCOTT” sign.

Finding no other name for this locally-modified variant of the 1927 road manual lettering, this author has christened the typeface “Fog City Gothic” and created a digital version of the larger two widths that stays true to the feel of the embossed, painted text. You can obtain these fonts from this very website in fact!

This chunky style was basically obsolete as soon as it came into use, though, because at about the time the new black-on-white street signs were rolling through San Francisco, the U. S. Public Roads Administration published an updated Standard Alphabets for Highway Signs. This was a landmark document which detailed the sans-serif road sign typography still in use across the country today. This lettering is known informally as “Highway Gothic.”

Detail of a page from the 1952 “Highway Gothic” standard alphabet, Series E, with precise dimensions marked out. Image: U.S. Department of Commerce

Detail of a page from the 1952 “Highway Gothic” standard alphabet, Series E, with precise dimensions marked out. Image: U.S. Department of Commerce

Who wore it better? (Hint: the one on the right is a typographic abomination.)

Who wore it better? (Hint: the one on the right is n o t g r e a t.)

Fortunately, the city has not undertaken a comprehensive sign update program since 1950, and the SFMTA only replaces street signs as needed. So you can find nearly all of the black-on-white variants still in use around the city, easily spotted by walking a few blocks along any street. (The iconic embossed enamel signs eventually rusted beyond usefulness in the field. A small handful of examples were still mounted on poles as of about 2010, and it’s possible one or two are still out there hiding in plain sight.)

As with the (less common) blue signs, you can find decommissioned white signs, including embossed ones, mounted to the sides of buildings at corners, given to (or sold to) the building owner by the city at some point. 

It remains this author’s hope that San Francisco will one day find a way to and re-embrace its original signature design legacy, resurrecting the all-caps embossed lettering and rounded corners of the midcentury heyday.

I recreated the Fog City Gothic font while researching this article. All the text, and images with no other source noted, are copyright 2021 by Ben Zotto. All rights reserved.

Thanks to the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the San Francisco Public Library, and David Gallagher at the Western Neighborhoods Project for assistance with research in the time of Covid. Thanks also to Erica Fischer for her posts, photos, and tweets; many times I thought I’d uncovered something new, only to find that Erica had already noticed it. (If I’ve done my job, there will be at least one tidbit here that’s new to her, and if you’re not Erica, hopefully many such new tidbits.)

SELECTED RESOURCES



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San Francisco City Engineer Michael M. “Stone Cold” O’Shaughnessy